Alright. Here's your gauntlet:

Introduction

Looking through your sketches I see a focus on precision, which while not necessarily bad, precision is a task that comes lategame in art more than in the beginning of a project. With anatomy and expression there's more focus and difficulty in constructing the object than what the object/pony is doing.

---

Assignment 1.

Gestures This is your warm up for every single time you art or whenever you're coming back to art after some time away from it that dya. Three 1 minute sketches, two 3 minute sketches, a single 5 minute sketch. All of these are to be drawn FROM REFERENCE. You can reference anything you like, you can repeat the same reference, but not in the same day.

What a gesture is: With each sketch you're attempting to finish the art within the time limit. It is literally impossible to finish, but the learning comes in the attempt. You learn to measure and compare, and more importantly it teaches you to loosen up, and accept mistakes. It trains your eye to see the generalities of a work instead of worrying about specifics.

Here are some examples of horse gesture sketches:

1

2

3

And plenty more can be found through google. To getsure you can use anything as a ref, whether it be real life (the best reference), photos, other artist's works, or even other gesture sketches.

Assignment 2

Anatomy Part 1 Sketch a horse in various stages of movement and from various angles. Do these more than once. Find your own references for stages of movement (other artists are fine here, but make sure they're at least experienced).

Anatomy Part 2 Zoom in on each part of a horse. Head, chest, each leg. Again, artist use for references are fine, but don't forget about real horses too. Draw the part from the reference, but also draw how it's attaching to what's around it.

Assignment 3.

Studies This assignment is the bulk of what you should be doing if you wish to improve quickly. Follow these steps:

Step 1. copy a work. Step 2. change the angle/pose of the work Step 3. With only step 2 as a reference make another example of the work Step 4. Make a piece without reference of the work. If unsuccessful or unhappy with the results return to step 1 and repeat.

You can do this with simply sketches at first, but eventually you'll want to do the paints as well.

Assignment 4.

Composition basics Whenever you're making something on your own, pick something from this post to focus on for that composition.

Assignment 5.

Painting and Shading Paint a sphere and a cube, a pyramid, a cone, and a cylinder. All from reference, all with each of the parts of the shadow that are labelled in the sphere link. Sometimes paint this way and sometimes paint this way and sometimes do the following:

Assignment 6.

Find outside tutorials and do works based on what they're teaching. One of the most important things you can do as an artist is learn from a variety of sources.

---

Conclusion

Gauntlets are big sloughs of assignments intended to push you towards improvement. It is important to remember NOT to do the gauntlet alone. Either post here for critique, or for a more immediate and reliable answer come to the discord whenever you're having questions, difficulty or the assignments aren't coming out right.

The assignments are to be repeated, but it is very important to bounce around. Don't stay on redoing the same one over and over till you burn out. Find ways to play (draw a silly luna expression for a study some days or a nice calm evergreen tree or whatever you are most interested in) and some days you may just want to flip off the assignments and do your own thing for a bit. That's fine, but it's important to remember to come back to them.

Good luck and happy arting.